


This is Why We Fight

by KingFraug



Category: Hat Films - Fandom, The Yogscast
Genre: Medium Bang, Yogscast Big Bang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-22
Updated: 2014-11-22
Packaged: 2018-02-26 15:01:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2656325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KingFraug/pseuds/KingFraug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a struggle in Panda Labs between the Flux Buddies and Hat Corp, Kim and Smiffy find themselves stranded in the Old World without a mystcraft book home. With limited supplies, they must find a way to get back to the book at the Flux Buddies old base without killing each other first. Along the way, they find that they have more in common than they expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is Why We Fight

She stumbled up from the ground, lifted by sore arms onto unsteady legs only to find the cold mud rushing to meet her again. Haggard puffs of breath audible in the empty silence of the hilltop rose in clouds of condensation away from her lips, trembling and chapped. Her hair fell long behind her as she threw back her head, peering into the roiling, grey sky above. Flecks of white snow swirled down from above, alighting upon her skin. A groan of pain rose from her chest through her throat.

“What did you do to me?” Smiffy’s voice came from somewhere nearby, anger apparent as he spoke through gritted teeth. “Where are we, Kim? What is this place?”

She turned to face him reluctantly, eyes narrowed and vision blurry. She blinked away the purple haze. His suit was torn in several places, stained red with blood from cuts beneath. He returned her glare, verdant face contorted in a scowl, mouth lined with rows of sharp teeth clicking together as he shivered. For as long as she dared she maintained the silence, feeling she owed him no response. He was in no shape to fight her, but the wheeze she felt with each exhale reminded her that she was just as unready for another battle as he was.

“You should be thanking me you know,” she snapped back. “You’re the ones that came to Panda Labs and tried to attack us in our own home. If I hadn’t pulled you with me into the mystcraft book we’d have both died in that explosion.”

“Oh, because you totally didn’t have nukes pointed at Hat Corp,” his voice wavered in the cold, a raspy growl rising in his chest. “We only did what you would have done if we hadn’t acted first.” By his side, an atomic disassembler was gripped tightly, though it was apparent that the strength required to lift the tool was not left in him as it scraped across the ground.

“And look where it got you,” she grumbled in frustration. “You and me both.”

“Can it, fluxy. I don’t want your excuses, just tell me what the hell this place is and how I get out.”

“You really don’t know where we are?” Around them craggy mountains peaked with snow clawed at the sky, frozen solemnly in time. The valley was sparse in greenery, years of harsh winter having turned the ground to rubble and permafrost, a pair of gnarled oaks the only signs of life remaining. Their trunks intertwined, layers of branches placed on top of one another in an age long competition for what little sunlight found its way to the ground. Kim raised an inquisitive eyebrow in response to Smiffy’s refusal to guess, his arms crossed and chin cocked upwards, lips pursed in annoyance.

“This is the Old World,” she explained. “We all used to live here. Truthfully, there were worlds before this one also, but that was before I was here.” On her feet now, she kicked at the snow and mud, sending the slurry dripping into a chasm. “The book I touched into was supposed to bring me back to my old base in this world, but obviously it didn’t work.”

“Probably something to do with the rocket launcher Duncan was aiming at my face,” the green man hissed.

“I seem to remember a certain walrus trying to wrestle that rocket launcher out of his hands when it went off.” The two bared fangs and puffed themselves up, neither able to conjure even the semblance of intimidation. “That said,” she continued, “the book at Panda Labs is almost certainly a pile of ash now.”

Smiffy buried his face in his hands, producing a muffled sound of frustration. “There must be some sort of return book.”

“If the book had worked properly and you hadn’t been dragged in with me I’d be standing right in front of it at New Camelot, which would be lovely.”

“So unfortunate for you that I exist,” he stuck out his tongue, serpentine and blue. She recoiled in disgust.

“It truly is.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

“To New Camelot,” her legs complained at every step, each made purposefully long and precise, yelps of pain stifled before he could hear. “Duncan’s not coming to save me any time soon, nor are your hairy friends.”

He limped over to her hurriedly, stumbling to catch up. “Hold on, what’s that supposed to mean? Surely two you had a backup plan for something like this.”

“Even if we did, time moves slower outside of this world. Our days are their hours, how do you think this place became such a mess?”

Smiffy stared into the clouded skies above, the air impossibly still. His eyes grew wide in shock as it dawned upon him. “The world is dying?”

“A-plus work there, Sherlock,” she said to the air before her, leaving him behind to gawk at snow. “We left it for too long and it kept on moving without us, just like I’ll leave you behind if you don’t start moving those weird feet of yours.”

He followed her up the slope, scrabbling over the rock sand snow. “Why would you want me to come with you?”

“If we go off on our own, we’re both going to die. I know how to get home, you still have a weapon. We work together until we get out of here and then we can go back to killing each other.”

“Just like old times,” he mocked in a sing-song tone as he clambered over the last ledge to where she stood atop the hill. “How far will that be anyway? The novelty of this allegiance is already starting to wear thin.”

The furrowed brow and grimace disappeared from his face as he gazed over the landscape of boundless ice and bare rock. Snow rose and fell like breath from the cliffs, swirling through the howling air and carving gashes into the ground below. Shards of ice slashed at their faces, cold digging its way into their skin, thirsty for the heat of life.

“Far,” she said, taking the first step. “Could be very far.”

 

The atomic disassembler carved through the bark and wood of the ancient oak with no resistance to speak of, shaving splinters off into the air. The pair had seen only a few trees on their journey and had made sure to collect the wood of each, Kim scouting ahead as Smiffy made short work of the battered trunks.

“The good news,” she called back to him, “is that I know where we are now.”

“Do I want to know the bad news?” he grunted, splitting the logs into planks and tucking them away before hoisting up the tool once more to hack at some exposed coal resting in the cliff face. Below them, what remained of a village they had looted and passed through earlier marked the only variance in terrain from the expanse of treeless plains. They had learned earlier that flatter was not better. The gales struck their feet from beneath them and leveled the land itself. The mountains were hardly more welcoming, but the bluffs and peaks were at least passable. From this height they could see for miles. Off in the distance, a set of viridian peaks sat amid the evolving wilds, tipped with snow and shaped by the winds. She eyed them, stretching outwards a flux-marked arm in their direction, homeward.

“The bad news is that the sun’s already setting,” she continued, ignoring his complaints. What was visible of the angular sun through the clouds had started to dip down beneath the horizon throwing long shadows over the ruins below. “There’s a plateau up ahead, there should be enough room for us to make a shelter there.”

“We?” he laughed, heaving a stack of planks in her direction. “I did the chopping and the digging. You can build us a shelter.”

She could feel the flux on her skin skittering like insects, rage crawling just beneath the surface weaving patterns into the flesh before subsiding and returning to dormancy. Tongue held by teeth, she turned away from him without a word and set to work building a hasty bunker out of the wood in the last dregs of sunlight. The anger bubbled away in her veins, boiling blood, burning strength.

She placed the final block down, and set to work on a crafting bench to construct a door. He appeared beside her with an armful of torches, lighting up the land around them and driving the stakes deep into the ground to keep them from flying away.

“Aren’t you going to laugh?” she asked him bitterly, arms folded protectively in front of the ramshackle hut. “Go on, I’m curious. Surprise me with some sort of wonderful new insult, you’re good at that.”

Smiffy eyed the shelter wearily, impassive to the mismatched wood types and perfectly square form, patched with dirt and roofed by unsplit logs. He shrugged, returning to his work and sticking a torch to its front and ducking as he passed through the door to light up the insides. She ran in after him, shutting the door behind her and stumbling on the uneven floor. Their quarters were restrictive, bedless, and unappealing, but the outside was certainly worse.

“That’s it?” she harried him further. “You must truly be losing it to pass up a chance at me.”

He looked down on her, his head scraping the ceiling. His inhuman mouth hung slightly open, pearlescent canines shimmering with saliva in the torchlight. She could tell he was tired. He did his best not to show it but the strain of the day was taking its toll on him, the cold digging at his strength.

“Duncan tease you about your building too?” his voice was haggard when he spoke, slumping to the ground and slowly placing cobblestone onto the crafting table. She replied with silence, shuffling over to help him with the furnace and placing it onto the ground near where he lay.

“Trott and Ross do the same to me, you know,” he remarked as he placed what little coal he had left into the opening, kindling a fire and breathing heat into the room. He raised his hands to the light and took in what he could. “They were the builders, back where we came from. A marble spire rising into the sky, garish and gaudy like, white walls ringing the place. That was our Old World. I hope it’s in a better state than this one.”

He laughed, something burbling in his throat as the cackle evaporated into a coughing fit. “You’d’ve loved to see my place actually. A flux lab, poorly constructed, badly ventilated.” He took her hand in his own, indicating her violet stained skin with a willowy finger. “Nearly ended up like you a few times, but they had my back. Made the place make sense, helped me have a home for my tinkering that wouldn’t kill me.”

She hazarded to speak at last. “I know how you feel.”

“We have good friends,” he remarked. “That’s no light fluxing you’ve got there. You’re lucky to have someone so intent on helping you out.” He dipped his head in embarrassment, chest heaving as hacked and wheezed, lifting it at last and laughing loudly. “I guess that puts me in your debt too.”

She pressed a palm to his forehead, feverish and sweaty to the touch. He huddled closed to the furnace, swaddled in his suit jacket and still shaking with a mixture of giggles and coughs. The ire drained from her body, the weight of the day now resting upon her shoulders and beckoning her to the floor. The furnace drew her in closer, its warm glow enticing and luring her to sleep.

“How was it there?” she asked, quietly. “The world you three came from, what was it like?”

Smiffy paused, staring into the flames as though divining his thoughts from the embers.

“It was quiet. None of the wars or missiles. We had our spire, our land, our crafts. It was just us three in infinite, sprawling lands.”

“It sounds beautiful,” she smiled at him, letting out a small laugh of her own. “Why did you leave?”

He was hardly with her still, one foot in the realm of dreams, the other slipping from their small cabin floor. The atomic disassembler clattered to the floor as his fingers loosened their grip, shoulders slumping and eyelids drooping. He mumbled in response, words nearly lost over the crackle of the fire, drifting as tired as their master from their forge of teeth and sinew.

“We were lonely.”

 

“I never knew you worked with thaumcraft before,” she called out to him over the wind, desperate to break the silence. From the moment the sun shed its first rays of light through the overcast sky and over the horizon they had been traveling, neither wishing another night on a crowded floor. Time drifted into abstraction as they trudged on, one foot in front of the other against the wind and frost, the sun above so obscured the shadows of swirling clouds that it all but disappeared.

“I wouldn’t have expected you to,” he replied through chattering teeth, “everything I had was left behind when we came to the New World.” He paused a moment, squinting into the wind at something below. “Is that a forest?”

“Let me see!” she called, quickening her pace and joining him at the ledge. Not far off along the face of the viridian mountains grew a smattering of trees, tall and burly unlike the gnarled survivors from which they had crafted their shelter for the night. A faint glow rose from behind the jagged edges of the peaks, unnatural light locked in combat with the permanently shadowed land.

“That’s it!” she squealed in delight, “That’s where we’re headed!”

“Don’t sound too excited,” he placed a hand on the back of her head, angling it downwards, “there’s an awful lot of open space between here and there. The wind won’t let us pass.”

“If we go around the edge of the field this journey’s going to last another day,” she thought aloud, frowning at the ripples thrown across the ocean of brush by the keening winds. “That’s a day we have no food or supplies for. We have to try.”

Smiffy grumbled, but still gave his nod of agreement. He was hardly build for the wind, his lanky figure twisted like a scarecrow in a hurricane when the blustering breezes came, but it still sounded better than another night trapped on the forsaken clifftops. Cautiously, the pair wound their way down the sheer slope to the ground, carving a walkway out of the stone face with the use of the disassembler. The air greeted them with a bellow, growing louder and louder as they descended.

He set foot at last on the soil, crumbling and frosted over with rime. “Here’s the plan. We walk single file and switch the leader every five minutes, that way one of us gets to build back their strength while the other blocks the wind.”

“Have you forgotten how tall you are?” she asked, putting a hand up to feel his forehead only to have it swatted away. “I’m not going to make a very good wall you know.”

“Yeah, let me know when you have a better plan,” the crunch of the permafrost under his heel reached her ears as he turned without another word onto the plain, pushing against the gale.

She followed close behind, keeping pace with him while he took the brunt of the force. The tall grass slashed at their ankles leaving scratches and thin red lines as each blade passed was quickly replaced by more. When the first switch came, she shuddered to find his face flushed and coated with snow, turning away from his battered visage to face the wind. She could tell she wasn’t helping him much, but he needed a rest from the full assault nonetheless, and she carried on a minute longer that needed. The sting was nothing like she had experienced before, distant and numb, and yet ever present. Her cheeks lost all feeling, her knuckles felt raw against the air, frozen fingers tucked away in palms held close against her shivering body. They trudged across the expanse, each shift covering less ground than the one before it. The woods at the edge of the field grew closer, offering solace from the cold.

From behind her came a sound like crashing leaves, turning to find Smiffy fallen in the reeds. His face was covered in sweat in spite of the ice clinging to his green skin, eyes staring off somewhere into the distance. With his hands he pulled himself forward, raking his legs on the frozen loam and grass, groans of pain catching in his mouth.

“Come on,” she urged him, “you have to get up. We’re nearly there.”

He lifted himself feebly only to drop to the ground seconds later. “I can’t feel my legs,” he croaked, tears streaming down his face. “Everything feels numb.”

She tugged at his arm, trying to move his body with her to no avail. She was hardly able to move against the wind without his weight added on. Panic began to settle in as she scoured the area for some sort of refuge and found only open air. Inside her chest, her heart attempted to burst, slamming in her ears and echoing through her head. A violet haze descended upon her vision, the feeling of spiders crawling over her skin as the flux scrambled about. It whispered into her mind, unintelligible, a chorus of voices filling her thoughts with the din of madness, impressing their will on her lips.

“Help me, mother,” she whimpered.

The sound of snapping bones was carried away on the wind as her hands contorted into impossible angles. Black claws drilled outward from her fingertips as her forearms bulged with sinew. She felt her face stretch over her skull on one side of her face, teeth reorganizing themselves into fangs crisscrossing her jawline. Her skin fluttered with etchings, the flux laying its claim.

She grabbed Smiffy by the torso and flung him over her shoulder, digging her claws into the brittle ground and vaulting forward into the wind and landing some distance ahead with a crash. Again she poised to launch herself, snarling and hissing as she sailed through the air by the newfound strength in her arms. Each flight left her feeling further and further from her body. Claws dug deepers, arms tensed tighter, teeth curled outward from her mouth in improbable arrays of tusks. She gripped what control she had left and pulled herself back into her own consciousness.

The two of them came crashing to the ground just beyond the first of the trees with a sickening thud. They both groaned in unison, limbs trembling as they pulled themselves out of the soil, soft compared to the icy ground behind them. The world breathed here, some life yet clinging on. The last leaves on the tree in autumn.

“It’s not so cold here,” he laughed with a frail voice.

“We’re nearly there now,” she replied in much the same way. “The Old World is more intact near the places where it’s tethered to the new one. The book should be less than an hour away.”

“You were amazing,” he smiled at her, the happiest face she had ever seen him make. “It was like you were using the flux as a weapon, I’ve never seen that before.”

She said nothing in response to his praise, unsure as to whom had truly been wielding whom and unwilling to think on the matter. Her skin still wriggled and crawled, teeth only now returning to their omnivorous original form. “I can’t stand up, can you?”

“Not even a little”

“Let’s break for a bit then,” she sighed, collapsing to the ground and taking in the fresh air, trying to calm the little legs which darted across her stained flesh.

 

Smiffy was the first to stand, not of recovery, but concern.

“Do you hear that?” he asked, hand curled around his ear, head cocked sideways.

She stared at him with one raised eyebrow. “There’s nothing to hear, what do you mean-”

A grating mechanical noise like a buzzsaw tore through the silence, startling her to her feet as well with the interruption. Off in the distance over the brushland something was stirring, a horde of something obscured by the snowfall.

“What the hell is that?” she cried out, trying to discern the figures in the pack.

“No clue,” he replied, picking up his disassembler and grabbing her by the hand, “but it’s headed our way fast and my vote is that we don’t stick around around to find out.”

The two of them tore through the wood unabated by wind, reaching the mountains in no time and starting to scale the ledge. The noise grew louder, sounds of motors and humming machinery filling the air.

As they clambered over the first ledge, Kim cried out.

“I can see it!” New Camelot sat squarely on its barren peak, snow gently alighting on its roof. The trees remained, chromatic and stark against the grey sky.

“Fantastic,” Smiffy hollered at her, “just don’t look back.”

She turned her neck to see the horde beginning to scale the cliff, metallic and streaked with crimson color. The figures were humanoid at first glance, four armed and faceless, legs fitted with wheels where feet should have been. Emblazoned upon their heads, a silvery symbol detailed in red and black glinted even in the pale light.

“What the hell are those?” she cried out as his fingers curled around the back of their collar, hoisting her onto his back as he leapt down to the clearing below, the creatures disappearing from view over the wall of stone.

He had barely managed to get away from the jump when they burst over, sparing no time in bearing down upon the two. She held tightly to him as he ran, legs still weary from their ordeal. The steel pack pulled up alongside them.

To their surprise, they kept running.

“Wait, what?” Smiffy halted, watching as each on darted by. He grabbed one by the arm, halting it in its tracks. “What exactly is going on here? What are you things?”

The thing’s head swiveled towards him, his own furious eyes reflected back at him in the automaton’s blank features. From a speaker somewhere on its body it spoke to them in a voice like tin. “Strife Solutions O-W-S unit F present. May I assist you in a selection from our catalogue?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You’re one of Strife’s creations,” Kim remarked aloud, climbing down to the ground off of Smiffy’s back. The machine’s face turned towards her, sliding open to reveal a rudimentary monitor, the words “Strife Solutions” flickering warmly with a polite “please touch anywhere to begin” underlining it. “What are you doing in the Old World?”

The screen flickered again, displaying the letters “OWS” in red, industrial font. “Strife Solutions is your friend. As part of our outreach program, Mr. Strife has created the Old World Salvage units in to clean up the Old

World of its litter and return it to its natural state.”

The sound of whirring buzzsaws and falling hammers came from over the last peak. Kim gasped, scrambling up the side and watching from the edge as the OWS units tore apart New Camelot, grabbing every resource they pulled from its walls and placing them into cavities in their chests.

“They’re looting New Camelot!” she called back to him, dashing to the crumbling base.

“The book,” Smiffy grumbled, turning to OWS unit F and shaking it by its shoulders, “you’d better not take the book.”

“I am sorry, I do not understand this request.”

He swore in frustration, kicking a chunk of dirt off a ledge. “Get me Strife then,” he pleaded, “you must have some way to contact him, he can make an exception.”

Unit F’s screen flickered, briefly displaying the image of a phone before returning to the OWS screen. “I am sorry. Mr. Strife is currently unreachable from this location. Perhaps there is some sort of interference, or perhaps Mr. Strife is currently busy in another dimension.”

“Oh piss off!” he spat, knocking the robot on its back and rushing to join Kim. He could see her from the ledge, the roof already torn apart and the insides exposed. She crawled through their shimmering limbs, ducking through the chaos towards a staircase.

She saw the OWS unit looming over the mystcraft set up as she leapt down the crude steps into the basement of dirt and stone, a hissing pit of molten metal and chests lining the walls the only discerning features save for the machine by the wooden stand, the book clutched in its clockwork claws. With howl, she flung herself onto its back, reaching for the tome but finding it just beyond reach as the torso around which she was wrapped began to spin. Her fingers slipped from the smooth, metal frame, sending her careening into the smeltery a few meters away, a stab of pain in her back where the corner had caught her.

By the time she hit the ground the flux had already begun to twitch and crawl again, arms bubbling and bulging as it coerced her into letting it take over. Her teeth came down on her lip in defiance, focusing on the pain and the taste of iron in her mouth and pushing back the violet haze. She made another pass at the unit, running up to it and trying to sweep its legs out from under it only to fall herself as she connected with sturdy steel, her strength failing her. Black talons drilled through the fingertips of her right hand and she clawed at the legs once more, this time leaving deep gashes in the hardware.

A yelp of pain escaped her lips sending a spray of blood across the ground as she willed the claws back in, alerting the unit to her continued presence as it recognized the damage to its body. A wheel connected sharply with her ribs. Then a second time. The unit pulled back its leg for a third blow only to find itself lurching backwards as a pair of green hands tugged on its neck.  
The robot righted itself faster than Smiffy could reach for the book, flailing as it kept the object just out of reach. Two more units descended to aid their companion, tearing him from the thing and giving it just enough time to tuck the book into one of its chest cavities.

“No!” Kim screeched, extending an arm out to its full length and further as the flux built artificial sinew and bone outwards, the rough concept of a hand forming at the end and clawing at steel. She felt a pang of anguish emanate out from her ribs and back, inciting another shriek as the abomination growing from her arm collapsed into a pile of frothing purple ooze on the floor short of its target. The units ignored it, taking apart the smeltery and hoisting chests to others as more and more flooded the basement. In moments, the whole base was empty save for the two of them, bloody and beaten.

The silence hung in the air like dust, broken only by the breathing of the battered pair, the sound of the horde now gone off into the distance in search of some other abandoned base.

“Kim,” Smiffy croaked, “are you alright?”

She twitched slightly, hunched over in a fetal position, her one visible arm planting a hand on the stone ground. “I’m alive.”

“Oh thank God,” he sighed, “I was worried-”

She interrupted him with growling noise, mumbling under her breath.

“This is your fault.”

“I can’t hear you,” he coughed. “What did you say?”

“I SAID THIS IS YOUR FAULT!” she roared, lifting her face to show the flux gripping her features like a mask, right eye glazed over in pink and purple. With a lurch her body rose up, writhing with flux and riddled with impossible geometry. Fangs arching outwards and curling over her lips froze her face in a pained grin, bubbles of ooze popping and spattering the ground with wriggling strands, arms coated with the taint and grown larger than her body. From her left eye, tears welled up and fell down her bare skin in droplets.

She limped towards him on her knuckles, feet just scraping the floor. “NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF IT WASN’T FOR YOU,” her voice burbled and moaned out of time with her lips. “I DIDN’T ASK TO BE LIKE THIS. TO BE A FREAK. TO HAVE EVERYONE FEAR ME AND WHAT I’VE BECOME.”

Smiffy rolled out of the way just as her fist smashed through the ground where he had been lying down. “Kim, what the hell are you doing?” he cried, voice broken with terror. He ducked just as her inky talons as long as swords raked the wall behind him. “We can find a way back to the others! We can fix this!”

“YOU CANNOT FIX THE WAY OTHERS THINK,” she wailed, bringing down a hand just short of his body, sending him flying backwards towards the staircase. “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE HATED. TO BE HUNTED FOR NO REASON OTHER THAN A STAIN ON YOUR SKIN.”

But he was gone, vanished up into the world above. She clawed upwards at the opening through which he had left, too large to climb through. A howl filled the room as she bashed the walls with her fists, flux hands snapping and breaking on impact only to fall off and be replaced by another. At last she burst through to the surface, wobbling back and forth. The world spun around her, slipping her mind slipping away from her body. She lurched back, watching as her vision began to move away into the distance. She tried to pull her senses back to her, swimming through her thoughts back to the light. The harder she tried, the further it went, vanishing into the emptiness, swirling and boiling with purple flux. Trapped in the Old World, her twisted mouth full of gnarled, contorted teeth let free a final bestial wail. Inside her head she curled up, covering her eyes, weeping.

 

It was dark.

 

She gasped, warm air filling her lungs. Her fingers twitched in soft grass, the sound of tree leaves rustling in the breeze about her ears. Arms ignored her requests to move, legs joined their protests. A numbness lay over her like a blanket. Above her, she could make out the dim silhouette of an orb against the grey sky.

“You passed out,” a voice came. She jerked her head towards the source, Smiffy sitting with his chin on his knees and arms around his legs close by. “The flux was starting to consume your body so I acted as fast as I could. Dragged you around until I found this place.”

“Where are we?” she asked, voice brittle and cracking.

“This is a restoration node,” he explained, toying with the grass beneath them. “Kinda like a hungry node but the other way ‘round. Kept the world in working order. At least around here. Put you back in working order too, as best it could at least.”

“Thaumcraft,” she muttered, tilting her head away. The top of her cheongsam was ripped and tattered, chest covered by his suit jacket. Her open shoulder bore a deep hue of purple where clear skin had been earlier.

“What happened to my arm?”

“Ah,” he came over to look at the new marks. “Like I said, I acted as fast as I could, but it must have spread in the time when you let it take over.”

Her lips began to tremble, remembering the moments she watched trapped behind her own eyes, eyes stinging. “I’m so sorry, Smiffy.”

He paused for a moment to wipe away the tears beading at the corners of her eyes with the cuff of his sleeve. “No, you were right.”

“What do you mean?”

“What you said back there,” he sighed, “when you started losing control. It was right. I don’t know what it’s like to be hunted and I don’t know what it’s like to be hated.”

He dipped his head, staring away from her. In his voice, she detected the distinct wavering of tears. “But I do know what it’s like to be a freak. Do you even know what I am?”

She turned to look at the back of his head. “I can’t say I do.”

“That makes two of us,” he chuckled quietly. “Trott’s a fucking walrus, Ross has his secrets. Three freaks together in one big freaky family.” He turned back to face her. “When you came to the New World you didn’t just have Duncan, did you? You had the rest of them. The Yogscast. Sure, a lot of them were enemies, but they were familiar. They brought with them between worlds a semblance of the old one, and that never left you. We knew no one when we set foot on that new world and built that shack. Everything familiar was gone.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I never knew.”

He let out a shaky breath. “I was going to leave you there at New Camelot. Curse your name and find my own way back. But when I took one last look behind me and saw you there, writhing on the ground in pain and out of your mind, I…” he trailed off.

She tugged on his arm, pushing the aching muscles out of her thoughts and embracing him. “You don’t have to say it, I know what you mean.”

“If things had been different,” he said, returning the hug, “and you had been on our world before I would like to think we could have been friends.”

“We’re still stuck here,” she reminded him. “With no way off this rock, a first night is coming soon”

A smile spread on his face, rows of jagged teeth somehow less threatening in the dim glow of the node. Beneath its rays the grass grew from dead soil, trees took root in frozen earth, and all things were as they should have been.


End file.
